A roadmap to the Corporate Auditor profession

In December 2019, Sir Donald Brydon published his report on his independent review into the quality and effectiveness of audit.

One of the key recommendations at paragraphs 2.2.2. and 2.2.3 of the report is 
that: “ARGA should facilitate the establishment of a corporate auditing profession based on a core set of principles. ARGA should be the statutory regulator of that profession. In doing so, I recommend that ARGA develops a coherent framework for corporate audit that includes but is not limited to the statutory audit of financial statements. This profession should encompass all ‘corporate auditors’, including the statutory auditors of the financial 
statements, and auditors of other corporate information, for example, information covering cyber security or related to environmental measures. Some of these corporate auditors may come from traditional audit firms, but others may come from new specialist audit entities. They must all serve the same audit purpose.”

ICAS established a Working Group (WG) to consider this recommendation and this paper explores how it could be implemented in practice. The WG comprised representatives from audit firms, business, and academia.

The WG notes that the Government has proposed in its consultation paper “Restoring trust in audit and corporate governance” (March 2021) to take forward Sir Donald Brydon’s recommendation to establish a new Corporate Auditing profession. The sequencing of actions envisaged in this paper is different in some respects to the proposals in the Government’s consultation paper but we consider the end result would be the same: we would have a Corporate Auditing profession that produces high quality audit and assurance of both financial and non-financial information, would set all the standards for this and would be an attractive career choice for exceptional talent in the years to come.